So Your Social Media Accounts Have Been Hacked

By Stephen Markley

“Ah, so this is something we will all have to deal with now,” I thought.

This after waking up Wednesday morning to discover that both my Twitter and Facebook accounts had been hacked and were sending people all kinds of strange messages. I was alerted to this fact simultaneously by my friend Cord (not a celebrity) and celebrity writer Jon Ronson (totally a celebrity), who tweeted me that he’d gotten a “dodgy DM” from me.

Indeed, it appeared as if my hacker had hacked my hacking virginity to direct message some 200 or so people with messages like, “you ar famous now ahah” and “what r u doing in this?” followed by links to broken videos.

I knew I should have paid more attention to Sandra Bullock in “The Net.”

First of all, to all the people who received these messages, let me apologize for my hacker’s poor grammatical choices. If you’re going to have some malware thingy picking up my password to disseminate a bunch of broken links to weird porn videos or whatever, would you at least mind spelling out the entire word “are”? It doesn’t take that many more characters, and it at least won’t embarrass me when you tweet my seventh grade Language Arts teacher.

Secondly, we really need to tackle the ultimate question of this hacking episode and decide if I was hacked at random by some algorithmic viral entity that’s just trolling around the internet picking into accounts via third party applications or if it's because I’m so motherf***ing famous that The Mirror, The Sun, and The Daily Star just gotta see what I’m tweeting to Jon Ronson.

I mean, I do have almost 1,000 followers, so I’m betting Rupert Murdoch was telling his minions, “Forget this Kate Middleton baby balderdash. Get into Markley’s account and find out what he was tweeting to his roommate on November 30!”

(It was: “Our dryer is busted so I put a pair of pants in the microwave. Now they’re still wet but will feel snugly-warm for at least 3 minutes”).

I’ve been thinking lately about the fragility of all the security surrounding our social media accounts. Given that the Petraeus scandal erupted over a few easily snatched e-mails, how far away can we really be from Facebook and Twitter bringing us all down? Who’s really keeping track of what “third-party applications” they’ve allowed access to their most sacred wall posts? What kind of precautions are any of us taking in our day-to-day LinkedIn connectioning?

Also, we need a way to stop people from looking through their friends’ wedding pictures in a really pervy way while they’re drunk and accidentally masturbating way too soon afterward.

Not me, just this guy I know. I’m just saying someone should have a way to stop people from doing sick things like that.